Apparently there aren't enough close voters to sanitize the site's quality regarding VLQ and off-topic questions.

I am restricted to have a fixed number of close votes in a daily (UTC) scope.

I've noticed that the availability of daily downvotes is somehow floating, regarding time, frequency and successful closure of low quality questions.

Given the fact that a very small community of people is active at doing that kind of essential house keeping at Stack Overflow, wouldn't it be a good idea that these should regain close voting capabilities at questions similar as with the downvote statistics?

I am not talking about my dupe hammer closures, but just the regular reasons for closing questions, and when they went through, or even lead to deletion of posts.

"... a fixed number of close votes in a daily scope." - yeah, chronic problem. We can burn through the daily allotment of votes in 15 minutes for some queues, like the VLQ queue. The site's policy makes no sense. How does one burnout after 15 minutes of review? We really need a policy change. We need unlimited down votes and close votes to combat the increasing flow of crap.
– jwwSep 15 '18 at 16:36

38

I, and others, have asked for more close-votes, one way or another, before - they were not forthcoming. Given how easy it is to use up all close votes, (especially on Sundays), it's not surprising that the queues are the size they are. Given that, the on-hold latency that assists with the rampant cucumbering and the 100k+ users who care for naught but rep, trying to curate SO seems like a pointless, sisyphean task. I've stopped bothering.
– Martin JamesSep 15 '18 at 16:43

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@Makyen What I am asking for is pretty clear IMO: I want to have additional close votes when it turned out my former ones were considered useful and valid throughout a day.
– πάντα ῥεῖSep 15 '18 at 17:30

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Personally, I prefer rather that we expand the gold badge owners close voting power towards other close reasons.
– BraiamSep 15 '18 at 23:19

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@Braiam The problem is so widespread that no single suggestion is going to solve it. We'd be best off adopting multiple things, perhaps not all at once, as it would be nice to get an idea for what effects each change has, but SE really needs to plan on multiple changes.
– MakyenSep 16 '18 at 8:13

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The company is currently focused on bringing in more content by the volume. Suggestions like this have about zero chance of getting implemented, unfortunately.
– JJJSep 16 '18 at 8:38

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I see one major potential problem with this: what if a group of users co-ordinates their votes to close questions for the wrong reasons? If these votes are not counted in their quota, wouldn't it be possible for them to keep closing questions that should not have been?
– GoodDeedsSep 16 '18 at 9:30

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@JJJ More bad content of no value doesn't help in the long term. So that's probably a very bad decision. Ask @joel (saul).
– πάντα ῥεῖSep 16 '18 at 18:19

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I honestly don't think that more close votes would be all that helpful. Very few people use all of their allowance so the only real solution is to fix the problem and add more abilities like dupe-hammer.
– DavidGSep 17 '18 at 11:31

@DavidStarkey Well that's far harder to measure but I would guess it's not all that much. I think a far, far higher number of people get bored long before hitting the cap for many reasons. 1. It's completely thankless, there is no reward. In fact, it often leads to abuse. 2. Waiting for 5 people to close an egregiously bad question is frustrating, especially when you see answers being added, often by high rep users. My main point still stands, fix the problem, not the sticking plaster
– DavidGSep 17 '18 at 16:47

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The root of the problem is that we have far too many producers than consumers. Any system with queues only work if the queues are empty at some point. This is basic computer science: if there's not enough processing power to empty the queue at any time, the system will crash, and no amount of queuing will save it. You get a Trash Overflow. The most sensible solution is to prevent as much trash as possible from entering the site in the first place, to minimize the need for manual moderation. And maybe stop antagonizing the veteran users so they don't boycott moderation in turn...
– LundinSep 18 '18 at 13:23

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@NathanOliver If the post is reopened after editing, then close vote served its purpose - it was good close vote. I don't think you will find many posts closed by mistake. And some surplus vote here or there someone might gain would not hurt anyone.
– Dalija PrasnikarSep 18 '18 at 15:01

2 Answers
2

I doubt such feature will be implemented. And I doubt it would help in long term.
I agree with your diagnosis:

Apparently there aren't enough close voters to sanitize the site's quality regarding VLQ and off-topic questions.

It looks like stream of VLQ and off-topic questions increases and the group of close voters decreases. Which is consistent with current StackExchange policy - they do their best to encourage askers to ask questions and they have abandoned veteran users, who work on cleaning the site. They stop implementing features focused on them, the main issue for them seems to be ensuring that improving the site quality is done gently enough.

As the trend is: more people asking and less people closing, no matter how many close votes you get, it still won't be enough. If company wants to change this, they need to work on changing this trend (improve tools needed for cleaning the site, make cleaning people feel valued for their work). If they don't want to change it, I think fighting this is pointless. I gave up cleaning. And I think I'm not alone.

Just one correction. The number of askers is not increasing anymore lately. For the last two years, it's kind of remaining constant. I agree though that review activity is in steady decline.
– TrilarionAug 27 at 8:36

This feature already exists for up- and down- votes. Does it affect the overall voting pattern on Stack Overflow? No, the additional votes made possible by deletion are a drop in the proverbial.

Close voting is like sitting on a committee of five. More close votes = being invited to sit on more committees. Thanks, but no thanks. I'd rather have more influence on the committees where I do participate (like, some closevote weight according to tag scores: a question is closed once the sum of weights of closevotes >= threshold).

But of course, no such system is forthcoming, since the company is far more interested in attracting new "stuck on my Python homework" users than doing anything about quality.

"More close votes = being invited to sit on more committees." Well, I could use regained close votes to provide useful duplication using my dupe-hammer privileges, maybe that makes a bit of a difference.
– πάντα ῥεῖSep 18 '18 at 19:45